He’s right.
And the blockchain brigade will be very upset with him.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has declared that "expensive digital images of monkeys are going to improve the world immensely." He was joking, obviously, though considering Gates's supposed connection to microchips in vaccines, one can never be too careful. What he's talking about are non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which came …
People have described the scam and bubble side both of over and over of late.
It's natural, the bubble burst again, the scammers ran for the exits.
and much like the latest return of JFK to Dallas, there is a room full of confused marks standing around wondering why their wallets are empty and their heads are on fire.
But just because people were dumping piles of real and virtual money on digital tulips or beanie babies doesn't mean there is nothing to the ideas. Yeah, crappy low res apes were obviously a scam. But the core of the NFT technology is attaching a digital title to either ephemeral or digital goods. There is nothing that said you couldn't issue and NFT that granted more rights as well.
So if you bought dumb apes, with no additional rights, you are a poor art investor. That does not mean that people who bought high quality art are going to get burned the same way. The artists that sold quality work can go on to make more quality work, and get another(and often needed) revenue stream in addition to selling prints. That's not a scam, it's just business, and a more dignified one then having to whore themselves figuratively or literally on Patreon or as a social media "influencer".
So let the bubble burst. Put the scammers in jail if you can. Once the air has cleared there will be room to see the parts of the scene that were actually worth something.
About the only thing I've seen on NFT's (the concept not the monkeys) would involve selling tickets for events. However it does then leave the database still ticking along once the event is over.
But really, that's about the only use case where it works from what I can see without duping people. It'd mean that the tickets could be traded freely, there's already scarcity since you know... Physics and local laws on event numbers, and since each one is an immutable token comes with a unique identify off the bat.
But then we're already mostly there anyway with modern ticketing scanners connected to a database.... So.... Yeah.
Fools and money.
IIRC, Stellantis (the company formed from the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot Citroen etc.) are using NFTs to store and track car service and condition details. With the way clocking, cloning etc. is used to defraud customers, this could actually be an unsexy but useful implementation of the technology.
That protects the event organiser from people turning up with fake tickets.
It doesn't protect the people who bought those fake tickets, because the blockchain can't tell them that this isn't the real ticket. You need a trusted third party, like Ticket Master, to tell you which tickets are real. And given that, you can just use them for the whole thing.
Yes, Ticket Master is really expensive, but still a fraction of the price of minting an NFT.
"So let the bubble burst. Put the scammers in jail if you can. Once the air has cleared there will be room to see the parts of the scene that were actually worth something."
No need to wait, IBM have the technology to see the parts of the scene with value:
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2013/05/how-to-move-an-atom/
We just have to get the NFT idiots cryogenically frozen first.
"those willingly parted from large amounts of money for the right to stand next to a picture of a cartoon chimp"
We used to be able to do something similar by the beach at Bognor (or Brighton or wherever). You could choose between a monkey, a corpulent man or a large lady. But in that case you stood behind it so only your head showed, it was really cheap (a couple of "bob") and you took away a real physical photo afterwards that you actually owned.
Somewhere I have a photo of some friends of mine and I at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk (kind of a Northern California version of Brighton Pier). Our faces are behind crudely painted pictures of a strong-man, a bikini babe, a surfer chick, a "caveman", a hippy and an astronaut. Surreal, but quite indicative of California in the mid-1960s.
That explanation's also valid for crypto currencies too except instead of standing in a queue, you are standing inside a circle and everyone is an equal owner to the poster. Except you don't really "own" the poster, you just own the right to a slot inside the circle next to the poster. And that's it. You can pay money to stand inside the circle and you receive money when you want to leave the circle.
And it's scarce too because the circle can only hold 1 million people. If you want to enter the circle, you have to pay market price for someone to leave the circle and you to take their place.
When everyone wants to leave the circle, good luck trying to find someone who will pay for your slot at the same price you paid for it.
"Pegged" crypto currencies are the same thing except when too many people leave the circle, the company will buy up the empty slots to keep the price "stable" against an external price point.
whats the global art market worth ?
Paintings that look a bit like sunflowers have no intrinsic value - I can get a picture of a sunflower for free on Google Images
Not sure the Louvre would accept the claim that it had no intrinsic value if you nicked the Mona Lisa
The Mona Lisa in the Louvre is a physical item of historical significance. If you painted a copy (even one that was visually identical) of the Mona Lisa it'd be worth a small fraction of the value. A receipt that says you own that copy, a significant amount less still. That's what your NFT is.
Not quite; a digital title saying that you own a digital copy of the Mona Lisa, without any right to the original. Meaning that other people can make copies of the original without owing you anything. There is in fact no copyright on the Mona Lisa, since the author died centuries ago before Mickey Mouse was invented, so there are no rights you can buy or own.
Right but there are two cases here, if the one that the other poster asserted is a digital title detailing ACTUAL ownership of the the ACTUAL Mona Lisa painting, or a more recent work that still has a living author and even stronger IP protections, it is massively valuable. When Jackson sold his back catalog, it was about the rights
If you buy a digital or paper receipt for the Brooklyn bridge from some dude on dark web, maybe not so much. So yeah, if you buy an NFT that confers no rights, you paid for something slightly less valuable than a signed/numbered poster print of a piece of original artwork. If you paid more for that then you would pay for a nice print, I hope you really liked the art.
NFT's at technolot aren't the problem. People who knew nothing about art were buying bad, low effort art for too much money. Pump and dump scammers were fleecing people left and right. Like so many other the people in the halls of power looked the other way till the whole place was on fire. Law enforcement wasn't interested.
That said, similar concerns arose with the printing press, photocopiers, and digital cameras. Last I checked they are still with us, though the printing press is mostly used for wedding invitations these days.
a digital title detailing ACTUAL ownership of the the ACTUAL Mona Lisa painting, … is massively valuable.
No, it really isn’t.
The painting is valuable, the digital title is little more than a receipt. If the title for the Mona Lisa ever goes missing, that doesn’t mean the Louvre no longer owns the artwork
The Louvre does not own the Mona Lisa the French Republic does. ;)
I believe that it had some German ownership between 1940 and 1944. I reckon you could have cashed in your NFT at some Swiss bank at that time - NOT.
NFTs the derivatives or the crapto world.
As of right now, probably not, no, because there is basically no legislation or case law suggesting that an NFT can actually *be* a "digital title". Just because one says it is, doesn't mean it is.
If such legislation and/or case law were to be established in enough places, maybe your digital title would wind up being worth something. It likely wouldn't work in the way web 3 purists want it to work, though, because in the real world things are messy. If you somehow contrive to steal the title to my house, a court would not then hold that you own my house. These are the sorts of safeguards that people turn out to quite like in reality. It's astonishingly unlikely that any legislature or court is going to sign off on a 'digital title' concept in which control of the NFT "digital title" alone determines legal ownership, just as they don't consider physical possession of a title deed to determine legal ownership of the property in any and all cases.
I don't know, though... surely the financial value of any item is - by definition - the maximum that someone else is prepared to pay for it. Now if you can explain to me exactly what "intrinsic value" actually means - and, preferably, quantify it - then we have a conversation.
Disclaimer: I worked for a mercifully brief period as a mathematical analyst for a hedge fund. The nature of the job involved first unlearning everything you thought you knew about what "money" means.
> has no intrinsic value beyond what some greater fool would give you for it ?
Nothing actually has any value beyond what somebody might want to give you for it. Take an ingot of gold, diamonds, or some such: If nobody wants to buy them they are literally worthless. On the other hand a used paper handkerchief, if some people are willing to pay good money for it, can have value. "Value" is an eminently subjective notion, remember the saying "one man's trash is another man's treasure".
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Apparently it was actually said about Barnum, by David Hannum, in reference to Barnum's part in the Cardiff Giant hoax. Or so the story goes.
Yes, Tusser wrote a variation on this theme. Specifically "A foole and his monie be soone at debate, which after with sorrow repents him too late.[0]
My gut feeling is that one variation or another of the phrase has been in widespread use longer than humans have understood the concept of writing. It probably goes back to the thoughts of the first proto-shaman, separating the ignorant from their meager scavenged food because his cave or hollow tree looked scary. Cushiest job in Africa a couple million years ago, I'm sure.
[0] From: FIUE HUNDRED POINTES OF GOOD HUSBANDRIE. —Thomas Tusser, 1573 ... If you haven't read the works of Tusser, I highly recommend it. Makes you realize how very little Humans have changed in 500 years.
To the best of my knowledge, Tusser wasn't writing that long ago.
I've read a few very early cuneiform tablets that might go back nearly one extra zero, though ... but that's all proto-literacy and contains nothing more than primitive accounting information.
Note that Homo Sap probably only dates back to 300,000(ish) years ago.
> Note that Homo Sap probably only dates back to 300,000(ish) years ago.
Sure, it was just a joke...
(Although we do step here in uncharted, or at least very vaguely charted territory: Was Neanderthal actually a "sapiens" or not?... AFAIK he could reach that far back (but I agree this is a futile case of childish one-upmanship and beg your pardon).)
Monero and whatever they are calling the latest Silk Road knockoff these days proved the technology works beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Billions of £/$/€ all circulating between people who literally commit crime for a living. Sort of like the WiFi at Defcon, if it works there at all, it actually works.
The main problems with Crypto at this point are people unwillingness to pull the plug on grandpa's old proof-of-work protocols, and the fact that Visa and MC can spend billions to make sure that I can't use some modern Crypto to pay for a soda at the corner grocery. Instead we pay trillions to companies to act as gatekeeps to all commerce, and get fraud, high fees, and terrible service in return.
Also, the public transaction ledgers actually helped law enforcement solve crimes (once the % that are smart enough to balance their own checkbook bothered looking).
[Visa and MC can spend billions to make sure that I can't use some modern Crypto to pay for a soda at the corner grocery. Instead we pay trillions to companies to act as gatekeeps to all commerce, and get fraud, high fees, and terrible service in return.]
Utter rubbish. Please provide some evidence.
"From now on, the Bitcoin in the real world is worth 30% or so less in terms of other currencies. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the Bitcoin here in Cyberspace, in your Wallet or USB stick or Cloud storage, has been devalued."
- with apologies to Harold Wilson, who would doubtless have sported a flat cap.
Wilson was not entirely wrong. The pound was devalued by 14% against the dollar, but that didn't mean that people could buy 14% less of the things they actually spent money on. Inflation at that time was well below 5%. Even if you wanted to buy dollars, the exchange controls dating from the second world war still limited what you could convert.
No-one, on the other hand, buys anything real with Bitcoin. If you actually want to buy something, you convert it to real money, so a 30% fall is really that.
That might have been true on the day he said it, but imports became more expensive the following day and inflation eventually adjusted the value of the pound in your pocket to make Harold a liar.
Proof that politicians have always been willing to insult the electorate's intelligence if they think it will make the awkward question go away until later.
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> imagine if you went up to the mona lisa and you were like "i'd like to own this" and someone nearby went "give me 65 million dollars and i'll burn down an unspecified amount of the amazon rainforest in order to give you this receipt of purchase" so you paid them and they went "here's your receipt, thank you for your purchase" and went to an unmarked supply closet in the back of the museum and posted a handmade label inside it behind the brooms that said "mona lisa currently owned by jacobgalapagos" so if anyone wants to know who owns it they'd have to find this specific closet in this specific hallway and look behind the correct brooms. and you went "can i take the mona lisa home now" and they went "oh god no are you stupid? you only bought the receipt that says you own it, you didn't actually buy the mona lisa itself, you can't take the real mona lisa you idiot. you CAN take this though." and gave you the replica print in a cardboard tube that's sold in the gift shop. also the person selling you the receipt of purchase has at no point in time ever owned the mona lisa.
> unfortunately, if this doesnt really make sense or seem like any logical person would be happy about this exchange, then you've understood it perfectly
https://imgur.com/NJirDQp
So if I buy some IBM shares on Robinhood and that only exists in a ledger somewhere then I don't really own any of IBM and i can't go to IBM and take a bit of the their building ?
I only really own part of the company if they give me a share certificate printed in copperplate on vellum ?
Almost. The "greater fool" theory is so named because at some point there won't be a greater fool willing to buy it, and the last fool who did will be exposed as such.
Last week's perfect example : NFT collector sells pixel art toad at a $1 million loss
It wasn't even a pixel art toad. It was a pixel art toad skeleton.
Like any pyramid style scheme, it's more of a spectrum, with the shark to suckerfish ratio changing rapidly from the initial transactions to the later ones.
Though if you look at the trading activity, many of these NFT collections underwent multiple and sustained shell transactions designed to simulate healthy trading activity and interest. It's about as honest as a game of Three Card Monty(which is to say it isn't honest at all, and anyone you see who looks like they resold one of those crap NFTs is almost certainly a shill). That's how you spot the sharks, and how they spot the suckers.
You're all wrong. I find NFTs are perfect for moving tax losses around my various offshore companies. So easy to create the exact value required without having the bore of actually going to an art gallery and pretending to like the thing you're buying. Even worse is when the artist wants to meet you.
Yes but that requires you to have a company with profits.
The advantage of art is that I can say to a Columbian Artisnal Pharmaceutical Grower - I really like that scrawl stuck on your fridge door, it really speaks to me, put it up for auction at Sotherbys and I will pay $100M for it.
The gentleman can then bank that perfectly clean money, without even paying tax in most countries, I can deposit the masterpiece in a vault in Luxembourg's special evil-villain tax-free zone and use it as collateral for a $100M loan from any reputable (or Swiss) bank
1 BTC is worth about $21K today. They obviously have value, I can trade them for money which I can turn into anything. Whether they have persistent value is the real question; whether they are investment grade is the next. The price of anything, from gold to polished sand is based on what they buyer will pay.
ps: when over privileged dicks start scowling about how valueless something is, there is probably a good reason to take more than a passing interest in it.
...it's speculation on a product which doesn't exist. an NFT is proof that I have that NFT, nothing more. OK, you can make money out of it, but it's not a real product that actually does anything. Like Cryptocurrency, it's totally virtual. There's a reason that you can use crypto to actually buy very much. The currency's only value is in trading it. It also ruins the planet with its 'proof of work'.